Field
The invention relates to a method and system for predictive lane change assistance, a program software product and a vehicle equipped with such system.
Description of the Related Art
Over the last years, driver assistance systems have been developed which assist a driver in a plurality of ways. At first, simple cruise control was introduced that maintains a constant speed of a vehicle by automatically adapting the output of the engine of the vehicle. The system has to be switched on and off manually and thus, only had a limited capability of increasing the comfort for a driver. In the next step, adaptive cruise control was developed and here in fact for the first time it seems that the environment of the vehicle equipped with such a system was taken into consideration for actively adapting the speed. This was achieved by sensing the distance to a preceding vehicle and by a set speed as target speed. Thus, the vehicle is actively decelerated in case that the preceding vehicle brakes and afterwards is autonomously accelerated again with the target speed as maximum. In today's traffic environment which is strongly affected by crowded roads, this was a significant improvement of the comfort of the driver.
This density of traffic on the other hand needs the full concentration of a driver. It is obvious that sometimes a lack of concentration causes situations which on the one side are dangerous and on the other side have a negative influence on traffic flow. In order to assist the driver, inform him or warn him for example, a lane departure warning system has been developed and also a blind spot detection system. Such systems are particularly advantageous when driving on roads that have a plurality of lanes. But again, the capability of the systems is pretty limited. In particular, the blind spot warning system only warns the driver in case that an intended lane change can be recognized. Although such blind spot warning systems have been further developed to lane change assist information systems it is still the driver's behavior that triggers the system to become active. This means that only if the driver has correctly interpreted a traffic situation and then decides to make a lane change, the assistance of the system will become effective. A lack of concentration when evaluating the traffic situation or a lack of experience of a driver which also results in a possible misinterpretation of the traffic situation can thus not trigger the system at all.
In particular, existing systems are not capable of positively recommending a lane change to a driver, because the function of the system is limited to a reaction of an intended lane change of the driver.